Anthro 390R
1 April 1999
The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860-1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs, by Anton Blok
The beginnings of the mafia in Sicily became apparent in the early nineteenth century, when modern government forced itself onto the long-standing feudalistic society. Most of the land was organized into large estates, owned by families who had held them for many years. Centralized government for many years after its institution existed only on paper, and in the fact that the peasants no longer had the minimal rights to the land they worked that they had held under feudalism. The separation of the workers from the owners created a niche that was filled by the mafia instead of the government, as it was in other areas of the world.
No government in the history of Sicily has ever managed to firmly ingrain itself into the rural countryside of the island. They relied instead upon local landlords who already had power to govern for them. The government never bothered sending police in because the land owners already had personal armies of field-guards (campiere) to do the same job, without government salaries. This poor development increased the already isolated position of most of rural Sicily, including Blok’s focal village of Genuardo. Bourbon legislation in the early nineteenth century unintentionally aided the “rise of a new and powerful landed gentry” instead of their claim of helping the smallholders and peasantry. However, it is necessary to establish a monopoly on the use of violence and physical force in order to create an effective general law under centralized government. The State failed completely to do this, and it is in this context that the mafia emerged. The mafia filled in the cracks in the relations between State and local landowners, and between local landowners and the peasantry.
The distinguishing feature between the mafia and the local brigandage (a fairly wide-spread, common phenomena then until the mafia took control of them, too) is the legitimization of power. Mafiosi work with those in authority positions, who represent the law and the State, to facilitate their “private control of the community’s public life.” (p. 95) The mafia’s corruption of the State officials in their local arena (who were usually locals themselves, which made it easier for the mafiosi to control them) subjugated the State to their own interests.
With the overthrow of Bourbon rule in 1860 and the establishment of Garibaldian, Sicilian ruling classes benefited greatly at the expense of the peasantry. The bandits that raided the estates of the rich, stealing cattle and other livestock, under the protection of those in a “power domain” (p. 100), were on the side of the landowners in the class struggle: they terrorized the peasants to keep them from organizing and mobilizing themselves. Through these means the brigandage became upwardly mobile, making friends in high places. This course to respectability became institutionalized in the mafia. Blok claims that “actual brigandage”, then, is “man’s pursuit of honor and power” (p. 101) for the bandit and his protector. It is not, as Hobsbawn says, the action of a revolutionary out for a brave new world. This Robin Hood myth, however, also serves to weaken peasant mobilization: someone else is already fighting for us, so we don’t have to. The following episodes in the years of expansion illustrate the “process of mafia” (p. 112): upper middle class is most likely to organize themselves into violent bands, with the best-off among them as leader.
Blok classifies the period of mafia expansion as that from 1860 to 1914. In Genuardo, the central figures in this expansion are Luca, Matteo, and the Jaconi family. Luca waged what seems to have been a gang war to seize control of Genuardo. He was unsuccessful and was arrested in 1863 along with most of his gang. Matteo, a former meber of Luca’s gang who later joined the Capraro band, had a small war of his own with the Jaconi, a powerful, landed family. The Capraro band was fairly typcial of its time (robberies, mail coach hold-ups, and extortion were their usual activties), and after Capraro was killed in 1875, his band split up into three. Giovanni Jaconi killed Matteo’s father and slaughtered his younger brothers. Matteo later avenged his father’s death by brutally disfiguring and killing Giovanni (this proof of his ability to use violence effectively earned him the honorary title of Don), although he was caught several years later and imprisoned, while the Jaconi were never prosecuted for the multiple homicide to Matteo’s family.
These incidents demonstrate the collaboration between the government and the civili (local gentlemen). Luca was assigned a job as village guard because it was easier to control him in that capacity than as a free-lance bandit. In Matteo’s case, the Jaconis were more powerful and so were never convicted of the murder of Matteo’s family, but Matteo spent over thirty-five years in prison for the vengeance killing of Giovanni Jaconi. The Jaconi were able to use their positions ad officers in the National Guard and as informants to the authorities to use violence at will and with impunity (Matteo’s father was an annoyance to them, and as Blok says, was liquidated). Matteo did not have this cover of legitimacy, so he was a bandit. Luca was a transitional figure: he couldn’t seem to establish himself as a mafioso, so he vacillated between brigandage and the more institutionalized status of the mafia. Therein lies the difference between mafiosi and bandits: mafiosi have their “papers in good order”; evidence fails to be produced against them.
New conditions arising around the time of the first world war such as suffrage, the persistence of large estates, the continuation of the “lord-peasant complex” (p. 141), and the war itself, exacerbated the class tensions that had caused the genesis of the mafia. These conditions made the landowners even more dependent on the mafiosi for keeping order. The mafiosi were now in what Blok calls their heyday, when they were more powerful than ever and began to treat the landowners the same as they treated the peasantry. This, as can be imagined, did not go over well with the landowners, and made their surrender to the wolves even easier with the advent of Fascism. The landowners did not raise a finger to help their “retainers” when the Fascists sent the army into Sicily and rounded them up like common criminals.
During their heyday, mafiosi were involved in activities such as homicide, extortion, cattle-heft (in addition to livestock theft in general), and protection. The Cassini family was the “axis of the mafia of Genuardo.” (p. 150) On one occasion they silenced the son of the town secretary, a man named Andrea Raimondi who had been deeply involved in the local cosca (group of mafia) and had advocated the return of some stolen cattle a little too vocally, and pinned the murder rather handily on a family so poor as to be village outcasts. They were later acquitted, and so no one was never punished for the murder. The Cassinis had a grudge against the Tortochetti family, who had helped with the forced elopement of Anna Cassini by a poor local mason named Bruno. Anna’s brother Giovanni killed Saverio Tortochetti later, and was acquitted of the murder due to lack of evidence (a common reason for dismissal of mafiosi criminal trials. Evidence seems to disappear whenever one of them goes to court).
The mafia use the same means to attain any goal: physical force. To the State, mafiosi perpetrated unlicensed violence (as opposed to legitimate violence, such as police, soldiers, etc.). Blok’s point is that “formal authorities pragmatically accepted the “rule,” that is, the power domains, of mafiosi.” (p. 172) They did not have the power themselves to do away with the mafiosi nor could they get others to do anything because of the length of time it took to mobilize police to the isolated rural areas. By the time the National Guard got there, all crime and evidence thereof had disappeared like smoke, and when the State authorities left again, it left the local authorities unprotected and surrounded by angry mafiosi. Obviously they would be endangering themselves and their families by doing anything other than docilely accepting subjugation to the mafia. It wasn’t until Fascism that anything could be done without risking life and limb. The Fascists had no qualms about inventing a reason to arrest the mafiosi. Without sticking around to wait for them to commit a crime, they invented a “permanent state of crime” (p. 144) under which they could arrest any and all members of the local cosche.
The Fascists were able to protect land interests, and put effective security forces in rural areas, controlling the countryside for the first time from a centralized government. Under these conditions the mafia became obsolete. This allowed the Fascists to eliminate, at least temporarily, the mafia by stripping them of their protectors, who no longer had reason to protect the increasing liability of mafiosi. “Fascism thus settled accounts with mafia by providing a substitute: it monopolized the use of violence without fundamentally changing the social milieu in which mafia had flourished.” (p. 186) Fascist dictatorship controlled the class struggle that had been the beginning of the mafia. Naturally, then, the fall of Fascism in 1943 saw a resurgence of mafiosi as power brokers.
The Allies landed in Sicily in 1943, and the Fascist forces fled to the mainland. This left the same state as before: a central government located elsewhere unable to firmly control on a local level. Once again the government existed mainly on paper. The mafia once again had a friendly environment in which to operate. “Large estates were ocne again placed under the protection of bandits and mafiosi and managed by the latter.” (p. 192) Inequality of landholding, the town’s small size, and its isolated location made Genuardo particularly ripe for the return of the mafia. By 1943, “mafiosi had already reassumed management and supervision of several large estates in the territory of Genuardo. They operated under the aegis of the estate owners, who, in turn, were backed by the loosely established Allied Government.” (p. 194)
The mafiosi quickly established that they were still powerful by raiding cattle, killing off their competition, and patronage and protection rackets (in other words, business as usual). The mafia now used violence to keep politics from swinging back to a hostile situation as they had experienced under Fascist dictatorship. The Giuliano gang slaughtered crowds of peasants who belonged to left-wing parties and Communism. They destroyed the headquarters of left-wing parties and peasant trade unions in six towns one night in June 1947 in a concerted attack, leaving behind anti-Communist pamphlets. The mafiosi also killed political leaders in the peasants’ struggle for land. “The use of sheer violence with impunity and acquiescence from the side of the authorities did much to frighten the peasant activists and their supporters and weakened their resilience”, in addition to furthering the reputations of the mafiosi as able to use violence effectively. These events helped to prevent the Left from gaining control of established power domains.
In Genuardo, no outright political murders occurred, because the peasants had fewer chances for power than their counterparts in other areas. But even though the violence did not happen as often as elsewhere, the threat of it was very apparent in Genuardo. This helped to constrain the peasants into the old patron-broker-client relationship, and keep them dependent on the mafiosi.
Violence and intimidation as a means of attaining a goal was part of the local culture. The ability to use them effectively commanded respect, and mafiosi were referred to as uomini rispetati (respected men). Mafiosi are “honorable”, “respected”, able to “look after their own affairs.” Their manipulation of this repuatation and its inherent social control allowed them to further isolate the locals and make them dependent on mafiosi as power brokers. Mafiosi enhance their positions by further violence, establishing themselves firmly as forces to be reckoned with. Violence was the means toward recognition of claims to honor and power. Blok’s explanation of the prevalence of violence is that the State “failed to monopolize the use of physical violence and had to yield its sovereignty to local power holders.” (p. 176) The function of the mafiosi is as a power broker, a middleman between the peasantry and the State (patron-broker-client). Rather than occupying formal offices, themselves, mafiosi controlled access to the persons in offices. They controlled the “junctions that tied the village to the encompassing society.” (p. 179)